The Sundance Channel and Full Frontal Fashion 2.0

For several years, a New York television show called Full Frontal Fashion offered nightly insider coverage of New York Fashion Week, replete with runway shows, designer interviews, expert analysis and reports from industry parties. At one point the show was based at the City's own television station, and for good reason: not only is the fashion business a central part of New York's economic infrastructure, but it is also a major driver of fundraising, programs for local charities, fair trade initiatives and sustainable sourcing. In fact, that's how I had my own first encounter with the FFF crew: at a private opening for a prominent fashion-themed museum exhibit.

Given Full Frontal's growing popularity as its programming scaled from the New York market to a network of stations nationwide, it's not surprising that the rights to the brand were recently licensed by a national media outlet--namely, the Sundance Channel. Sundance, of course, has strong social enterprise connections--its indie emphasis is a direct reflection of the Sundance Film Festival's mission, and the channel has further enhanced its do-gooder cred with its promotion of environmental sustainability in its programming and other initiatives.

If this year's offerings are any indication, it's evident that Sundance is somewhat tentative about its new fashion media brand. A number of New Yorkers are upset that Sundance has deep-sixed the core of Full Frontal's value added--daily insider coverage of Fashion Week--for a series of documentaries that show how several designers prepare for Fashion Week. This sort of thing is hardly new--there have been several documentaries showing both famous & emerging designers as they prepare for Fashion Week or a contest--and the emphasis on what came before only serves to emphasize the real-time events that Sundance Full Frontal Fashion has conspicuously left behind.

This need not be the case. Awkward faux-fashionista gush like "our pal (really) Padma Lakshmi" and "All our credit cards are equal!" just doesn't seem natural coming from a company that has cultivated the image of representing capitalism with a conscience, and Sundance really doesn't have to play that game--the fashion business itself is tired of the tired Sex-and-the-City stereotypes.

Instead, the Sundance Channel has a real opportunity to transform media coverage of the fashion business by stripping Fashion Week to its foundation as a hybrid social business venture. Almost every runway show, benefit & party offers an angle for blending social significance with ratings-bait in a way that transcends the earnest eat-your-vitamins ethos that makes so much do-gooder media unwatchable. That the social enterprise world all too often struggles to see the connection says less about fashion's supposed frivolity than the narrowness of our own perspective.